“You kind of adjusted… we didn’t like it. We just, we kind of adjusted.” Transcript for Things Like That, They Happened We grew up in the neighborhood that was near Pulaski School. And at the time that I went, it was an East Pulaski and a West Pulaski. One was for the black children and […]
“I wanted to [write] a book where people would say, ‘Oh, man, I loved that book, I want to go see where it took place…’” Produced by Rich Elliott. Transcript for Proud of Where You Came From I got interested in local history as part of, as my focus I guess, in my fiction writing, […]
“We used to say this was ‘up South,’ and, you know, the other places were ‘down South.’” Transcript for The Signs Were Not There All of my folks—my father and my mother’s side, they were all from Florida. Gainesville, Alachua, Florida, and all down there. Every summer, my mother packed us all up, you know, […]
“It was the dirtiest place in the mill. But I guess they made a decent salary. So he encouraged my father to leave Florida and move to Gary.” Transcript for How We Ended Up Coming to Gary We grew up in the neighborhood that was near Pulaski School. My grandfather lived in the neighborhood. He […]
“We saw the writing on the wall, we knew it was coming.” Produced by Rich Elliott. Transcript for Bethlehem Gave Up the Ghost Bethlehem Steel’s a conglomeration of other steel plants that were merged or brought in from other areas. And it was all back east—you had Maryland, you had New York, you had Pennsylvania. […]
“We had a village out there in Small Farms.” Transcript for A Wonderful Childhood I grew up in the Midtown section of Gary. It was a place called the Small Farms. It was called that for a reason because where I lived there were no sidewalks, no paved streets. I remember as a kid, we […]
“I got to watch that. This was big for me. It was something that I just dearly loved…” Produced by Rich Elliott. Transcript for I Was All Over That Mill Bethlehem Steel had just opened up this whole new steel mill just a few miles away, and I always wanted to get into the engineering […]
“Did you want to take a stand… or was it just an inevitability, ‘Man, we can’t stay here any longer?’” Transcript for Green Light to Go Out of Town It didn’t take a lot of, “Let’s sit down and have a Ward Cleaver moment with Beaver, you know, and tell him what’s going on in […]
Parts one and two of a two-part biographical story in which our 101-year-old storyteller remembers part of her family’s journey prior to the Emancipation Proclamation up to her birth in St. Louis, MO, and her move as a young adult to Gary, IN. Part I: But I’m Still Here “The doctor…made a comment, ‘Oh, the […]